


Agents of Death

by SolarMorrigan



Category: James Bond (Craig movies)
Genre: 00Q Reverse Bang, Alternate Universe, Art, Grim Reapers, M/M, Reverse Big Bang Challenge, Some dark themes, see inside for further notes, this is mostly light-hearted I swear
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-26
Updated: 2020-01-26
Packaged: 2021-02-27 08:42:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 16,665
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22414180
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SolarMorrigan/pseuds/SolarMorrigan
Summary: Life after death wasn’t quite what Bond had expected.Not that he could altogether recall what he had expected. He was fairly certain, though, that he would have expected the afterlife to include light and peace – or perhaps darkness and pain. Maybe he thought he would have faded to nothingness after dying.He didn’t expect to have a day job, was the short of it.
Relationships: James Bond/Q
Comments: 31
Kudos: 209
Collections: 2019-2020 00Q Reverse Big Bang





	Agents of Death

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Archangell](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Archangell/gifts).



> Wow this was a trip and a half. This thing argued with me the whole way, but I'm glad it's out and finished so I can share it with you guys! And if you enjoy it, you should absolutely thank [Archangell](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Archangell) for creating the lovely art that can be found about halfway down the story and for bouncing ideas with me and sharing his thoughts and for being so amazingly patient with all my back-and-forthery about this story for the last few months. He deserves something good, so I hope the story doesn't disappoint!
> 
> Great big, huge thanks also to [castillon02](https://castillon02.tumblr.com/) for the amazing beta work! The fact that this story is actually readable and mostly without loose ends is almost entirely thanks to you and I really, really appreciate it. Also-also thank you to [azure7539](https://azure7539arts.tumblr.com/) for listening to me complain and work some story knots out and also encouraging me to actually sleep now and then. Invaluable input <3
> 
> Lastly: **this story deals a lot with death and does contain mentions of things that may be upsetting to some people.** This includes violent death, suicide, murder, and sex slavery. Most of these things are brief and the overall tone of the story is meant to be light, but please take care of yourselves
> 
> Enjoy!

Life after death wasn’t quite what Bond had expected.

Not that he could altogether recall what he _had_ expected. He was fairly certain, though, that he would have expected the afterlife to include light and peace – or perhaps darkness and pain. Maybe he thought he would have faded to nothingness after dying.

He didn’t expect to have a day job, was the short of it.

-/-/-

There _was_ light at the start of it, but it was less of a light at the end of a tunnel and more of a harsh overhead lamp. It illuminated the small, barren room Bond had found himself in with stark ease. The walls were grey, the floor was a different shade of grey, the single door was grey (metallic), and the table Bond was sitting at was grey (metallic, but cheaper than the door).

 _Interrogation room_ , Bond’s brain provided.

He wasn’t entirely sure where the information came from; it could have been personal experience, or he may have seen it on a television show. There was a curious blankness when he tried to think back to where he’d been before the room.

Bond expected the lack of– well, anything to fill in that blank should have at least been unsettling, but he couldn’t quite muster up the emotion.

He did know one thing with the absolute faith of truth: he was dead.

Whatever was happening now really couldn’t do much worse to him, could it?

It wasn’t peace, but it was a calm sort of acceptance. He sat back in his chair and waited.

He didn’t have to wait long. The door opened and a man stepped into the room. He didn’t look particularly angelic, nor demonic. He appeared to be just a regular man: receding hairline, strong nose, a serious but not altogether harsh expression. He was in his late 40s, possibly early 50s (or had been? Bond didn’t quite want to consider how age worked in the afterlife).

The man sat at the table, folded his hands in front of himself, and met Bond’s gaze squarely.

“James Bond.”

It wasn’t a question so much as a statement of fact; an announcement that the man knew who Bond was. At this point, he probably knew better than Bond himself.

“I’m Gareth Mallory.” The man put out his hand, and Bond shook it.

There was nothing yet worth saying, so Bond remained silent. Mallory nodded.

“I’ll cut straight to the point: I imagine you already realize you’re dead.”

“It had occurred to me,” Bond confirmed, a bit dry.

“That’s one hurdle over with, then. You’ve been brought here because we have a proposition for you,” Mallory went on.

Bond cocked an eyebrow. Again, not what he’d been expecting. “Proposition?”

“A job offer, really,” Mallory clarified.

“And here I thought my days of worrying about bills had come to an end,” Bond quipped.

“It’s not a job as you would find one in the mortal world. You don’t receive a paycheck and you hardly need health benefits. Consider it more of a calling.” Mallory paused, watching for Bond’s reaction. “Of course, you’re not compelled to accept.”

“If I decide to turn it down, then? I suppose I’ll – what? Fade into the abyss?”

Mallory frowned, prodigious nose scrunching somewhat in distaste. “Good God, no. You’ll be as free to enjoy your afterlife as any other soul,” he said. “No obligations or outstanding responsibilities, no need to be anywhere or do anything. Nothing but undirected free time. I’m sure the concept appeals.”

It didn’t.

“What’s the job?”

“You would cross over into the mortal plain in order to secure and escort souls over to the afterlife.”

Bond stared at Mallory. Mallory stared back, entirely serious.

“You want me to be the Grim Reaper.” Bond’s voice was flat with disbelief.

“If that’s the term you’d like to use,” Mallory replied casually. “Not _the_ , however. You would be one of several.”

This brought forth a whole slew of questions and curiosities, but one struggled to the top of the list: “Why?”

“We can’t have just one person taking care of every soul in the world. There are certain limitations–”

“Why _me_?”

For a moment, Mallory was silent, just watching Bond. “What do you remember about your life?” he asked at last.

“My name is James Bond. I appear to be British.” Bond stopped there.

Mallory continued to watch him. “That’s not uncommon. Occasionally, memories of your life return with time. Sometimes, they never do.” It was a matter-of-fact answer, neither sympathetic nor unfeeling; it just was. “You’ve been offered the job because you have the correct… temperament for it, Bond. It is felt you will perform well in the position.”

Bond wondered, for a moment, what that said about him. What it said about the person he’d been in life.

“As I said, you will not be forced to take the job, but we would appreciate a prompt answer,” Mallory went on, apparently unconcerned, as though he already knew which way Bond was swaying.

Bond released a breath (was that necessary here?) and sat forward in his chair. “When do I start?”

With a small smile, Mallory put out his hand to shake once more. “Well, if your schedule isn’t too full, I thought we might start now.”

-/-/-

The building Mallory led Bond through was like nothing so much as a rather bland government office. The sky, when Bond caught sight of it through the few windows they passed, was the pink-purple state of dawn and dusk. Bond couldn’t tell where the light was coming from.

People passed them as they walked through the halls, most going by without comment, but one or two stopping for an introduction. He met Bill Tanner, who found souls suitable to positions that needed filling—“The reason you’re here, officially,”—and Eve Moneypenny, who had an air of being perpetually busy but of making time for you, so you had better feel lucky – “Records,” (which couldn’t be all there was to her job, Bond thought – and by the sly look on Moneypenny’s face, she suspected he was thinking as much).

They seemed to be working their way deeper into the bowels of the building, eventually ending up in a long hallway that put them at a set of automatic doors. Beyond the doors, there were… screens.

It seemed to be a computer lab of sorts, with people spread out across the room, sitting at desks, typing on keyboards, and speaking into headsets. Apparently, death had entered the digital age.

“More computers involved than I would have expected,” Bond commented to Mallory.

“I suppose you were expecting long, black cloaks instead?” A voice broke over the ambient murmurs and clicking of keys. “Everyone carrying scythes, perhaps?”

Bond turned to find a young man watching him from beneath a shock of wavy fringe, gaze assessing through angular spectacles. He was slight, jumper-clad, and cradling a tablet in the crook of his arm; there was nothing terribly impressive about him, but something his voice, in the way he held himself, said he wasn’t to be disregarded.

“We don’t really go in for that anymore,” the man continued, then turned his attention to Mallory. “Is this our new extractor?”

“Our new reaper, yes.” Bond had the feeling that the correction in terms was mostly for his benefit. “Bond, meet Q. He’ll be responsible for your assignments.”

For a moment longer, Q regarded Bond carefully, making no secret of the way he was sizing him up; Bond repaid him the assessment in kind. At last, Q broke into a polite smile, stepping forth and offering a hand that Bond accepted. “I look forward to working with you,” Q said. “Bond?”

“James Bond,” Bond offered. “Q?”

Q’s benign smile remained in place. “That’s right.”

Interesting.

“Tell me, James Bond, have you ever reaped a soul before?” Q asked in that same cordial tone.

Bond blinked. “I couldn’t say,” he answered after a beat.

He wondered for a moment if people just went a bit strange after dying. Somewhere to Bond’s left, Mallory released an unmistakably long-suffering sigh, leading Bond to believe that this was likely usual for Q, but perhaps still unusual at large.

“Well, we’ll get you there,” Q said, glancing once more at Mallory, before nodding to Bond. “Good luck with your new job.”

With that, Q became businesslike once more, turning away from Bond and Mallory to approach the large screen mounted at the front of the room. Bond watched him go before turning back to Mallory, who looked resigned in the same way someone with a particularly eccentric friend might when trying to bring them somewhere new.

“Death is turning out to be more interesting than I would have thought,” Bond said lightly.

“Well,” Mallory replied, voice dry, “we do so enjoy exceeding expectations. Shall we continue?”

-/-/-

There was training, of course, though hardly what Bond would have thought of as appropriate training for a would-be grim reaper. It was really more like the training an athlete might do – or a particular sort of government agent.

Mainly, there were obstacle courses. There was stealth training and some endurance testing. Someone mentioned something about practicing with a scythe, but after his encounter with Q, Bond really couldn’t say for sure whether or not they’d been serious.

Physical training in the afterlife was interesting. Though he couldn’t have said for sure whether or not he had a physical body, he did seem to tire, if only briefly. He could feel his muscles burning and his lungs working to bring in air he wasn’t sure he needed. Going through exercises had a certain novelty to it.

The motions came quite easily to him, almost suspiciously so, and Bond spent several frustrating hours of his downtime attempting to recall who or what he had been before his death. It hadn’t been long since he’d appeared in an interrogation room in the afterlife, however, and his mind didn’t seem quite ready to cooperate – if it would ever be at all.

Bill Tanner was a calm and amiable presence in the midst of the exertion. He came and went as his own schedule permitted, checking Bond’s progress and, apparently, making sure he was getting on alright.

“We’ll have a residence prepared for you soon,” Tanner assured him at one point. (Bond hadn’t quite gotten the hang of the passage of time here yet; the sky never changed from its dawn-dusk light and sleeping seemed largely optional.)

“Where you have me is fine,” Bond grunted as he let himself down from the chin-up bar. “Surprisingly homely for a standard issue room in the land of the dead.”

Tanner chuckled. “All the same, you’ll tire of constantly being here eventually. Having your own space will be better.”

Bond let the subject go with a rolling shrug, taking a pull from his water bottle. The presence of food and drink had surprised him as much as anything; the dead had no need for it, after all, but apparently it sometimes just hit the spot.

“Seems like you’re progressing well, in any case,” Tanner continued. “Should be ready for the job soon.”

“And what if I’m not?” Bond dropped the question casually. “Just out of curiosity. What happens if you send me over and I do terribly?”

It was Tanner’s turn to shrug. “Then I was wrong and the job isn’t for you, after all.”

“And then what?” Bond pressed.

“Then you go find something else to do with your afterlife, I suppose,” Tanner replied.

Bond waited a beat. “That’s it?”

Tanner smiled. “That’s it. Really, Bond, not everything over here is quite so life or death. You should get used to it.” He snickered as Bond rolled his eyes, as amused with Bond’s reaction as with the pun itself. “If you like my jokes, I’m sure you’ll really like working with Q.”

“Really? He doesn’t quite seem the type for puns.” Bond had only met Q the once so far, but he’d have guessed the man’s tastes ran a little more towards the bizarre.

“Q’s been here a rather long time. He seems a bit odd at first, but he’ll warm up to you.” Tanner tilted his head to the side, considering for a moment. “Very likely, anyway.”

“So people do leave this place,” Bond mused, considering the implications of Tanner’s phrasing.

“No one here is a prisoner. People come and go. I suppose Q’s just stuck longer than most.”

Tanner left Bond to his training shortly after, citing work of his own that needed doing, and Bond found himself distracted from thoughts of who he used to be by thoughts of the mechanics of being dead.

It was actually less frustrating.

-/-/-

Bond stared. “I thought you didn’t go in for this anymore?”

From his spot in front of the wall of gleaming scythes, Q clicked his tongue. “You don’t see anyone just wandering around with these, do you? And we’ve summarily done away with the black cloaks. Too conspicuous.”

“Of course they are,” Bond found the presence of mind to reply as he looked over the shining blades stored neatly on sturdy hooks. “You really do use these for reaping souls, then.”

“ _I_ don’t, but yes. They’re special blades; they neatly sever the soul from the body without leaving any sort of mark on the physical form.”

“Special is a word for it.”

Q pulled a face, somewhere between annoyed and amused. “Some people use the term “magic,” I suppose.”

“But not you.” Bond looked over with a smirk.

“Not usually, no.”

“So you have _extractors_ and _special blades_ , not grim reapers with magic scythes.”

“Which one sounds more professional to you?” Q asked, brows raised. “There does have to be a certain level of accountability, and making things sound _whimsical_ doesn’t help.”

Bond nodded, making a face as though he was considering it. “I’m just surprised you haven’t found a way to automate the process,” he said lightly. “Seems more efficient.”

Q sighed, looking dangerously close to rolling his eyes. “For some things, a… more personal touch is required. Besides, the blades are irreplaceable to the process.”

“Oh?”

“Irreplaceable in general, actually. They were created by Death themself.”

 _That_ was interesting. “Have you met Death, then?” Bond asked, head cocked to the side.

“Haven’t we all?” Q countered, one brow raised in dry amusement.

Bond shot him an unamused look and Q smirked. “I haven’t met them personally, no. I don’t know anyone who has. Our rules and regulations are written out now, but at some point they weren’t much more than oral tradition, carried on from whoever _did_ last speak with Death. The scythes, though,” Q gestured to the wall, “they’re an extension of Death themself. You can feel it in them. Now would you like to practice, or not?”

“Practice reaping souls?”

“Practice with the scythe.” A little smirk found its way onto Q’s face. “I said we’d get you there. Small steps, Bond.”

“Starting with the scythe.”

“Yes.” Q’s eyes were on Bond, suddenly intense. “You’ll choose one, and it will be yours. No one else may use it once you’ve claimed it.”

With a nod, Bond stepped forward, drawing level with Q, and reached for the first scythe in the row. The tips of his fingers brushed the handle but stopped short of grasping it. Something about it felt– off. A glance at Q revealed nothing but a patiently expectant look. An examination of the blade revealed nothing at all; it appeared to be identical to all the others.

Frowning, Bond withdrew his hand and moved down the line, this time reaching for the scythe at the other end. Again, some itching not-quite-rightness danced over his nerves. He pulled back. Q said nothing.

There was nothing to distinguish one blade form the next so far as Bond could see, yet there was clearly _something_ different about them. Something special that set them apart from one another. He was beginning to get the feeling that _he_ wasn’t the one doing the choosing here.

This in mind, Bond stepped back, taking a look at the set as a whole. Each blade glinted in the light, each pole was clean and polished, each one looked, felt, _was_ the same. Except–

Except for the one third from the end.

It wasn’t different, but it was. Shinier or duller or angled slightly differently, there was _something_ about it that suddenly jumped out at him.

Bond reached out and took it.

Q hummed, an interested little noise in the back of his throat while Bond tested the weight and feel of the scythe in his hands. It felt good.

“May I?” Q held out his hands, and after a moment’s hesitation, Bond handed over the scythe.

With an ease that belied his earlier assertion that he didn’t use them, Q turned the blade this way and that, inspecting it carefully. “Number seven,” he announced, handing it back. “That’s interesting.”

“Is it?”

“Number seven has an interesting history of owners.”

Bond hummed, a vague sound to show he was listening without inviting elaboration; if the blade was his now, he didn’t suppose he really needed to know about the previous owners. Q didn’t seem to be in the mood to share further, in any case.

“Take that to the training room. Someone will be there to work with you,” Q instructed, handing the scythe back.

“Not you?” Bond asked, only half-serious; he hadn’t expected Q to be the one leading training, but his proprietary handling of the scythe made Bond wonder.

“Not me,” was Q’s only answer.

“Perhaps another time.”

“Unlikely.”

Bond shrugged, turning to leave the room, only pausing when Q spoke again.

“Oh, one more thing, Bond: you check the scythe out of this room before going on assignment, you check it back in when you return,” Q said sternly. “Do _not_ , for the love of God, _lose_ it.”

“Come now, Q, have some faith in me.” Bond tossed the scythe from one hand to the other, offering Q a grin. “How do you expect me to lose a big thing like this?”

Q only frowned suspiciously at Bond, crossing his arms over his chest.

Working with Q, Bond decided, was going to be fun.

Whether Q appreciated it or not.

-/-/-

Death was more complicated than Bond had initially given it credit for.

His job wasn’t simply to usher souls into the afterlife (there were reapers who did that, of course, but Bond wasn’t to be one of them); his job was to corral the difficult and dangerous souls.

Not every soul was thrown into the general afterlife, apparently. Some required special handling. The souls of the truly innocent—children, usually—were sent elsewhere, somewhere better suited. The souls of dangerous people were treated similarly. People who had caused so much pain and suffering in their lives, who had been so deliberately cruel that their souls had become twisted and broken, needed to be kept apart from the general populace.

That was where Bond came in. The intense training, at least, made more sense with this revelation. And when it became clear that Bond wouldn’t be scared off by the full scope of the work, he was given his first assignment.

“Just going to throw me in, then?” Bond inquired lightly as he was led to a gate, where he was told he’d be able to cross over into the realm of the living. “What happened to small steps?”

His guide—Q’s second in command, a tall woman called R, with dark hair twisted into braids and a smile kinder than Bond had seen on most of his new coworkers—gave a shrug. “It’s really the sort of thing you have to learn by doing, after a point. You can only get so far by watching,” she said. “Best just throw you in and see how you do.”

“Interesting tactic.”

“You’ll have Q in your ear once you get up there, anyway. He’ll guide you through as needed.”

“Oh, well _that’s_ a comfort.”

R stifled a short laugh. “Look, if you fuck it up, the worst thing that’ll happen is a poltergeist. Not ideal, but hardly terrible. No need for nerves.”

Bond shot R a look, one brow raised. “Do I _seem_ nervous?”

R shot Bond a look right back, smirking over at him, but instead of answering, gestured to the corridor they were fast approaching. “Here we are.”

There were several doors down the corridor, all reinforced, with discrete control panels beside them. Not quite what he’d imagined a “gate” to look like, but the afterlife really had yet to adhere to any of his expectations.

R approached the first door in the line, opening it up by tapping something into the control panel. “In you go,” she instructed.

Without giving her the satisfaction of even a dubious look, Bond stepped past R and into the chamber beyond the door. It was small, just enough room for the elaborate circle etched into the floor and for someone to stand just outside its perimeter. “Cozy,” he commented.

“You won’t be in here for long, it’s just for leaving or returning to the afterlife. Can’t let people just depart from anywhere,” R said from the doorway. “You’ll stand in the center of the circle and I’ll activate it from out here. A technician usually does that bit, but your first outing usually rates someone higher.

“You’ll come out on the other side near to your first target and Q will take you from there. Any questions?”

Bond considered the details of the assignment he’d been given, rubbing his thumb absently on the grip of his scythe. “I do have one,” he decided.

“Shoot.”

“Why are you and Q the only ones with codenames?”

R blinked at Bond for a moment before breaking into a brief round of snickers. “My name is Regan. Coincidentally starts with the letter after ‘Q’ People started called me ‘R’ as a bit of a tease when I took the job as Q’s second and it stuck.” R shrugged. “Q’s not a codename, either, as far as I know. Q is just… Q.”

Bond had a moment to consider the information before R was pointing to the circle. “Stand in the center and try to keep all your bits in.” She cupped her hands together in front of herself, as if attempting to manually compact Bond; with an exasperated glance, Bond put his feet together, pressed one arm to his side and tucked the other holding his scythe in close. “Good. Good luck out there, Bond!”

With a parting smile, R shut the door, leaving Bond alone in the chamber.

-/-/-

The trip itself wasn’t quite as terrible as Bond thought it might while standing in the middle of a ritual circle and about to travel to another plain of existence. There was a distinct chill, like ice water dribbling down his spine, and the odd sensation of passing through a nest of cobwebs, but the feeling faded quickly.

It was the landing that was really disorienting.

Everything was so _much_ . He could feel the air on his face, the light against his eyes and still against his eyelids even after he’d closed them, and even the ground seemed strangely _solid_ beneath his feet as he stumbled against the onslaught of sensation.

“ _Take a moment to get your bearings, Bond_.”

Bond swore, having forgotten about his earpiece in his momentary disorientation. (He had considered asking about the mechanics of making what appeared to be an ordinary, electronic earpiece work between dimensions, but had decided he really didn’t want to sit through the explanation.) “Q,” he acknowledged with what he felt was a reasonably steady voice. “This is different than I remember. Or it would be, if I could actually remember.”

“ _Odd, how we don’t even realize the sensations are gone until they come back_ .” Q’s tone was gentler than Bond would have expected. “ _How are you faring now_?”

The ground had steadied beneath Bond’s feet, and his senses were acclimating quickly. “Adequately recovered,” he reported.

“ _Good_ ,” Q replied, professional once more. “ _You ought to have come up in a back garden. Where are you_?”

Bond glanced around. It was night, clear enough to see the moon and a few twinkling stars in the sky, but the darkness did little to impede Bond’s vision; he could see slightly overlong grass, a flowerbed, a cherry tree with nearly ripened fruit, a little fence surrounding the space, and more idyllic little gardens on either side.

“Suburbia,” Bond answered at last. “Not far from the back door.”

“ _Right. Your target is inside the house, second floor, bedroom at the end of the hall_.”

“And I suppose I don’t have to worry about nosy neighbors seeing some prowler with a bloody great scythe breaking into the house?” Bond asked as he approached the door.

“ _We’ve been over this_ ,” Q sighed, though he didn’t seem altogether unamused. “ _You’re only seen if you want to be seen. And you_ can _put the scythe away, you know. There’s a lot of empty space around you_.”

Though Bond was far from unintelligent, he would admit—at least to himself—that the idea of being able to store things in what sounded an awful lot like a pocket dimension was still a little boggling. “Perhaps next time,” he demurred.

Q hummed over the line. “ _Just remember: you’re a dead man in the realm of the living. Physics doesn’t really apply to you in the way it used to_.”

“Right…” Bond murmured, regarding the door in front of him.

With the deep concentration of thought of someone who very much hoped they weren’t about to make an idiot of themselves, Bond lifted one foot and put it through the door.

There was a disorienting moment of muscle memory that told Bond he ought to be kicking the door in, not smoothly putting his leg through it, but it passed, and then Bond was standing on the other side of the door.

“I’m inside.”

Q, when he answered, sounded rather pleased. “ _Good. Proceed_.”

The house was quite normal, by most standards. It was fairly tidy, filled with family photos and clutter and signs of a life lived. If Bond hadn’t been given the briefing that had preceded this assignment, he likely wouldn’t have suspected that this was the home of a man who, over the course of his life, had kidnapped and murdered eight women.

His death wasn’t to be anything grand; there would be no showdown with the police or a victim bravely fighting back. He had grown old, and would succumb to a heart attack in the night. Quiet and too easy, perhaps, but Bond’s opinion on the matter had not been asked and likely wasn’t wanted.

“ _He’s hit sudden cardiac arrest, Bond. Now would be a good time_ ,” came Q’s voice in his ear.

Bond reached the bedroom at the end of the second-floor hall and found a bed with an elderly couple lying within. The woman was sleeping peacefully, her back to her husband, who did very much look as though he was in the throes of some painful medical predicament.

“ _Try not to hit the wife_ ,” Q reminded Bond. “ _She’s not due yet_.”

“Noted,” Bond replied, raising the scythe as he had done so many times in training.

He had never been faced with a real human being in training. Never been faced with the reality of literally taking someone’s soul from their body. Never been poised over someone who was taking their last breath.

It wasn’t a feeling of wrongness that had him pausing in his swing, however, but a feeling of settling in. An inevitability. Death came for everyone, after all, and certainly someone had to be sure souls reached their proper destination.

Bond swung the blade.

It passed unimpeded through the bed, though the man’s shoulder, and down into the center of his chest, where it met brief resistance. Bond applied more force and it pulled through, taking something out with it.

The thing clung to the blade of the scythe, writhing as it stretched from the man’s chest, and finally snapped loose with a sick sort of ripping noise.

The thing – the _soul_ wriggled on the blade, in no way humanoid, instead appearing rather like someone had taken long shreds of wet hide and clumped them together. Dark ooze dripped and flung from its flayed ends whenever it moved too sharply, the droplets evaporating to nothing wherever they made contact.

For a moment, Bond could do nothing more than stare in awed disgust. _This_ was a human soul.

Q’s voice broke him from the stupor. “ _The passage is opening now. Make sure the soul goes through_.”

“Understood,” Bond replied.

There was a light tearing open in the middle of the room, not bright or appealing, but rather like the filmy grey sunlight that came through the clouds on a hopelessly overcast day.

Bond approached it swiftly and, without hesitation, thrust the end of this scythe into the light.

“ **NO!** ” the twitching mass wailed, suddenly coming to life and wrapping two appendages very like arms around the blade, another appendage gripping the hard edge of the light.

Reacting on impulse, Bond pulled back and punched the soul in the largest reachable part of its mass. Whether it had been startled or simply hadn’t been that strong to begin with, Bond would never know, but it released its grip enough that the light claimed it.

The moment Bond pulled his scythe from the passage, the light sealed itself away, leaving Bond staring into empty space in the darkened bedroom.

“ _Well done, Bond_ ,” Q murmured over the earpiece. “ _Head back outside and R will pull you back_.”

Bond nodded—he had the sneaking suspicion that Q could see him perfectly well—and, with one last glance at the sleeping woman and the corpse in the bed, exited the room.

-/-/-

Bond was waylaid by someone terribly official and clerical as soon as he exited the gate; they launched into a speech about post-extraction forms—of course there was still paperwork in the afterlife, of course there was—and practically chivied him down the hall. Bond tossed a glance at R, who waved cheerfully and was absolutely no help at all.

Lacking in other options, Bond trailed along behind the enthusiastic paper-pusher until they passed a familiar hallway – the way down to Technical Support.

“Pardon, I’m sorry to interrupt,” Bond interjected without very much remorse at all when the clerk paused for breath, “but you may have noticed that I’m still in possession of my scythe.”

The clerk glanced at the item in question, then looked back at Bond, one brow raised. “Yes…?”

Bond offered an apologetic smile. “Q was terribly particular about checking it in as soon as I’d returned from the assignment, and we do just happen to be passing by his department.”

Uncertain, the clerk pursed their lips. “You still need to fill out your post-extraction forms.”

“And of course I will do so. After I’ve checked in my scythe,” Bond insisted. “Q doesn’t seem like the type of person you want to disappoint.”

Though Bond had been blatantly lying, the clerk actually seemed somewhat cowed. “Well, I’ve never met him personally, but I have heard – well.” The clerk cast one more displeased glance down the hallway leading to Technical Support. “Come to Records as soon as you’ve finished.”

“Right.” Bond nodded, already heading down the hall.

He had no idea where Records was and was fairly certain the “I got lost” excuse would hold up at least once. In the meantime, he supposed he’d really better actually check in the scythe. Bond was both amused and intrigued by the idea that upsetting Q held water as an actual threat, and had every intention of finding out why that was; just not today.

Technical Support was fairly quiet when Bond arrived, and Q was easily picked out standing in front of the large setup of screens at the head of the room. Bond walked up the aisle between desks of technicians who largely paid him no mind, though a few looked up from their work to watch him—or the glinting edge of his scythe—as he passed.

“Good evening, Q,” Bond murmured, coming to a halt a few feet behind the man (he had decided that, as time didn’t really seem to exist in the realm of the dead, it was always evening; it was easier that way).

“Bond.” Q turned to face him. “I didn’t expect to see you so soon. I imagined Records would have tried to get their hooks into you.”

“Well, there was still the matter of this.” Bond brandished the scythe, sliding around Q’s comment about Records.

“Ah, yes. How did it handle for you?”

Bond thought back a moment to the way the blade had glided through everything, to the ripping tug of the soul coming loose. “Smoothly,” he answered.

Q watched him for a moment, perhaps expecting more, or deciding if the reply was satisfactory, but eventually he nodded. “Good. I can take that for you and–”

“Ah-ah.” Bond twitched the handle back out of Q’s reach. “You said it had to be checked back into the equipment room.”

Q blinked at him, surprised, then broke into an amused twitch of a smile. “So I did,” he acknowledged. “Well, now is as good a time as any to take a break. Let’s go.”

They walked in silence a short way, past some offices and closed rooms Bond couldn’t discern the purpose of before Q spoke. “I get the impression that your ego doesn’t need any stroking, but you did well on your assignment. Particularly for your first time out.”

“No need to go overboard with the compliments, Q,” Bond replied dryly, smirking at Q’s snort of restrained amusement. “How long has it been since you’ve been on that side, anyway? You sounded as though you had some experience with the sensation.”

“It’s been quite some time, but frankly, I don’t care to go there.” Q gave a sort of shrug as they reached the door to the equipment room. “It’s very different from when I left.”

Bond considered the information as Q unlocked the door. “Tanner said you’ve been here longer than most.”

“That’s true.” The words were distracted as Q went to the small computer in the corner of the room to bring up the log.

“But you remember who you were,” Bond didn’t quite ask. “Your death, your life before that.”

There was no response. When Bond looked over, expecting to see Q occupied with the computer, he found that the other man had gone still, back stiff and hands paused over the keyboard. After a long moment, Q resumed typing. “I remember,” he answered at last, clipped and closed-off and practically screaming that he was not willing to continue this conversation.

A few people had asked Bond how he’d died since he arrived in the afterlife, and several more had volunteered the story of their own end; he hadn’t thought the topic was taboo. Q’s sudden change in demeanor said that it was, at the very least, off limits for _him_.

“Scythe back on the wall,” Q instructed, still facing the screen.

Bond complied. “I still can’t remember anything from before,” he offered quietly.

Q typed on in silence for a minute, then sighed. “It may come to you. It might not. It doesn’t particularly matter around here. Come sign this.” Q moved to the side, gesturing to a small screen and tablet pen for Bond to sign. “Death isn’t a fresh start, exactly, but it’s a new set of circumstances. It is what you choose to make of it.”

Bond signed the screen and approved the entry, glancing back over at Q. “I think I’m beginning to see that.”

Q offered him a wry look in return. “I suppose that’s something.”

-/-/-

Death's Doorstep by [Archangell](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Archangell)

-/-/-

It had apparently been some time since a new reaper had started in this division and Bond was gifted with the dubious pleasure of having Q as his usual field guide. There were others qualified to do the job of guiding a new reaper through the ins and outs of existing as a being of death on the mortal plain (though admittedly none with Q’s length of experience) but it seemed as though Q had taken an interest in Bond’s introduction to fieldwork.

“You know, they had me rather convinced you were someone important,” Bond replied to Q’s standard greeting through the earpiece on Bond’s third assignment. “But you always seem to have time for this.”

“ _Oh, I’m terribly important. You ought to feel blessed by my guidance_ ,” Q answered dryly.

“Right. Blessed that you take special time to order me around,” Bond grumbled, gratified by the huff of static he was fairly certain meant Q was stifling a laugh. “Where is my target?”

“ _Top floor_ ,” Q answered promptly.

Heedless of the people rushing past on the busy sidewalk, Bond craned his neck to look up to the top of the needlessly tall office building he’d been deposited in front of. “You must be joking.”

“ _Not balking at a little trek up the stairs, are you, Bond_?” Q teased.

“You’re enjoying this too much,” Bond muttered as he bypassed the revolving doors in order to walk smoothly through the wall. “So I can turn invisible and walk through solid objects, but I can’t fly.”

“ _That would just be silly_.”

“Of course it would.” Bond rolled his eyes, turning away from the elevator and heading for the stairwell; considering the number of floors and the amount of people inside, the stairs would likely be faster. “Why is it you can never open the gate inside the building I need to be in?”

“ _The opening of a gate isn’t precise and buildings can be tricky. If we open the gate under a wall, for instance, it could cause damage to the structural integrity,_ ” Q explained. “ _We are opening a small hole in the fabric of the dimension, after all_.”

“But you can open a passage back to the afterlife for newly extracted souls from inside buildings,” Bond pointed out.

“ _Newly extracted souls, yes, but notice how you’ve had to go back outside in order to go back through the gate? It’s a different process_.”

Bond considered this for a moment. “I think you’re bullshitting me,” he decided, “and you just like making me work harder.”

“ _It’s a perk_ ,” Q admitted, unrepentant. “ _Now look, do you want a lecture on the magic and physics of portals to and from the afterlife, or do you want to extract the soul of a crooked business tycoon who has been maliciously fucking people out of their money for 30-odd years_?”

“Well, when you put it like that.”

“ _Good. Because a disgruntled employee is going to shoot him sometime in the next five minutes and you really should be there_ .” Q sounded entirely too smug as he imparted this information. “ _Hop to it_.”

Bond continued his trek up the stairs, muttering something under his breath that he would never admit was just, “ _You_ get down here and hop to it.”

He did make it in time to extract the tycoon’s soul, and the ensuing struggle was startling, considering the body the soul had come from looked like it had never worked hard a day in its life.

The soul clung to the body with the tenacity of the truly greedy, giving an outraged screech when Bond finally managed to wrench it loose, then began to tug itself immediately from the end of the scythe.

“Hey!” Bond shouted, making a grab for the soul just as it had managed to rip itself from the edge of the blade; his fingers sank into it like a boot into thick mud, wet and sucking.

“ _Nononononono_ ,” the soul chanted, heaving and writhing in Bond’s grip, making slow progress in inching free despite Bond’s best efforts. “ _Iwon’tgowon’tgowon’tgo_!”

“ _I really do not recommend letting that soul escape, Bond_ ,” Q’s voice came more seriously through the earpiece.

“I’m not-!” Bond left off with a grunt of surprise as the soul jerked free with a stinging yank on Bond’s hand, and he brought the scythe up again with intent to catch it.

The soul oozed down through the air and just under the edge of the blade, and with a static-filled hiss, sailed straight through the chest of the employee who had shot the tycoon. The employee, who had been standing there and staring at the body of his late boss with something like shock, gave a heavy shudder and stumbled back a step or two. In his haste, Bond ran right through the employee as well, though with visibly less effect, to make another grab for the soul before it could suck itself through the wall.

He caught it by its nebulous edge and, dropping the scythe for a moment, got both hands around it to cage it against his chest. Though it left not a mark on him, it left Bond with the distinct feeling he would need a shower later. “Where’s the bloody _passage_ , Q?” Bond ground out through gritted teeth.

“ _Opening now_ ,” Q said, even and calm as the light did indeed begin to split the empty space in front of Q.

With another shriek, the soul renewed its struggles, but Bond held fast. As soon as the passage was wide enough, Bond shoved the soul through like he was passing a basketball, giving it one more hard push when it tried to clutch at the edges of the passage. “Off you go, you bastard,” Bond said with heavy-breathed satisfaction as the passage sealed over it.

“ _Well done, Bond_ ,” Q murmured as Bond knelt to pick up his scythe. “ _Head back outside for pickup_.”

Bond nodded, eyeing the employee who was still clutching at his chest even as security stormed the office. “R said the worst a loose soul could turn into was a poltergeist,” he mused as he passed through a security guard and back into the hall.

“ _In some cases. In the cases of more determined souls, though… some damage is possible_ ,” Q replied.

“That’s vague.”

“ _Well, there’s some reading you could do on the subject. Assignments of extractions past_.”

“Perhaps,” Bond said, neither committing to reading nor denying it. “I’ll see you back in the afterlife, Q.”

Bond carried on down the stairs, rolling his shoulders with the satisfaction of a challenge defeated and pleased with a job done.

-/-/-

Bond’s job was not, by any stretch of the imagination, pleasant. It was, however, a necessary sort of service that Bond was capable of and almost appreciated being able to provide. It gave him a direction to move in and something to do with his time. It gave him a challenge.

Sometimes it gave him enough of a challenge that he could admit to needing help.

“Alright, Q,” Bond sighed, “ _how_ do I stow this thing away?”

“ _Your scythe_?” Q sounded surprised.

“No, Q, my jacket, it’s too warm to wear,” Bond deadpanned.

“ _No need to be snippy, I just thought you’d already figured it out. It isn’t any more difficult than walking through solid matter and you figured that out right off the bat_.”

“Then how do I do it?”

“ _The process really isn’t too dissimilar,_ ” Q began. “ _In the same way you concentrate on being able to move through an object, you concentrate on reaching through the barrier of the dimension_.”

Bond wondered if he glared hard enough at a spot in the air, Q would be able to feel it. He wasn’t sure if Q’s continued silence meant it was working or not.

“When I do that, I know there’s something on the other side,” Bond finally relented in his glaring to say. “I don’t know what’s on the other side of a _dimensional barrier_.”

“ _Space, mostly. Just a lot of empty space_.”

“That’s _very_ helpful.”

“ _Just sort of reach out. Like you’re reaching through a wall, but it’s invisible_ ,” Q recommended, slightly more helpfully.

Bond tried it, reaching the hand holding his scythe into the air in front of him. Unsurprisingly, nothing happened.

“ _Still not working_?” Q inquired after a moment of frustrated silence.

“Nothing,” Bond replied tersely.

“ _It helps sometimes if you imagine something to reach into. Pretend you’re hanging it in a closet, or something,_ ” Q suggested. Bond’s silence must have communicated how unimpressed he was by the idea, because Q sighed and went on, “ _Honestly, Bond, I’m not having you on. It helps, trust me_.”

Well, Bond supposed he had no reason _not_ to trust Q, and in this case had nothing to lose but a little pride in doing so.

With a quiet sigh, Bond stared again at the space before him, imagining the dim interior of a coat closet. It wasn’t like the closet at the flat he’d been set up with in the afterlife, and he wondered distantly where he’d seen it before. Rather than dwell on the thought, he reached forward and envisioned the scythe going into the closet.

Outside of Bond’s imagined storage space, the scythe disappeared.

Slowly, Bond released his grip on the handle and withdrew his hand. There was no accompanying thud to suggest that he had dropped the blade on the ground.

“ _Well_?” Q asked after a moment.

One day, Bond really was going to have to work out how Q’s surveillance worked. “Gone,” he reported.

“ _Well done_ ,” Q gave his rare but sincere praise. “ _Just make sure you get it back out before coming through the gate_.”

Bond reached back into his mental image of the closet and retrieved the scythe. “So if I put the scythe away, I’ll be able to reach it in that space no matter where in the mortal plain I am,” he confirmed.

“ _Yes_.”

“But I won’t be able to reach it from the afterlife.”

“ _No_.”

“That makes no sense.”

There was an amused burst of static. “ _Do you want a lecture on_ –”

“No, Q, I do not want a lecture on the magic and physics of anything,” Bond was quick to cut in. “Not unless you’re going to buy me a drink first.”

“ _Well, I suppose the lecture will have to wait, then_ ,” Q said dryly.

“Pity,” Bond replied, and wasn’t terribly surprised to find that he meant it.

-/-/-

Q never seemed to feel the need to pass Bond on to another handler, even once Bond had gotten the hang of being an “extractor.” He was occasionally preoccupied and unable to assist, but largely it was Q who would be on the other end of Bond’s earpiece when Bond entered the mortal plain. It became second nature for Bond to ask Q whatever inane question about the mechanics of death crossed his mind.

“Can I eat while I’m over here?” Bond asked one afternoon as he wandered past a little bistro.

There were two souls in the area he had to take care of – the leader of an international sex slavery ring, who had been shot by government agents about an hour ago, and his partner, who would be committing suicide halfway across the city in a few hours once he realized he was going to be caught. Rather than send Bond out on two trips, he’d simply been told to wait it out, and for the moment he had nothing to kill but time.

“ _If you’re currently corporeal, yes_ ,” Q answered after a few moments, likely having been occupied with something else while Bond was on standby. “ _It won’t do anything for you, though_.”

“Won’t do anything _to_ me, though,” Bond stated for confirmation even as he approached the bistro.

Q’s distracted silence was answer enough, and Bond went in, decided to start simple with a BLT sandwich, and found a table in the patio area where he could watch the people walking by.

The sandwich tasted good, but the sensation of eating it was rather overwhelming. Though he’d mostly gotten used to the changeover from the afterlife to the mortal plain (“atmospheric differences,” Q called it), certain things still took Bond by surprise. Every bite held a burst of heady smoke from the bacon, a crush of water from the lettuce, the slick slide of sliced tomato against the inside of his mouth. The toast was the strangest; it was soft to bite into, yet the texture was so acute that it was nearly like licking nice-tasting concrete (and Bond really hoped that wasn’t a comparison he’d drawn from past experience). After half the sandwich, he gave it a rest and turned his attention to peoplewatching.

“What do you like to eat, Q?” Bond asked after a few minutes, idly curious.

“ _Not much, really. I’ll go in for a good cup of tea, but since eating isn’t actually necessary…_ ” Q trailed off, giving the silent and invisible impression of a shrug.

“What about when you were alive?” Bond asked casually.

Though so far, every attempt at asking after Q’s life had been firmly stonewalled, this question was apparently innocuous enough to get a pass. “ _Still not much. Whatever was available and easy. Eating always felt like a waste of time, so imagine my great joy when I didn’t have to bother anymore_ ,” Q replied dryly.

Bond shook his head, amused. “You do appreciate your efficiency.”

“ _That I do_.”

With the light conversation still in his mind, Bond found he wasn’t even quite as brought down by presiding over a sex trafficker’s suicide as he might otherwise have been.

-/-/-

Dead people who were not making an effort to be seen largely would not be – not by most mortals, not by cameras, not by mirrors, not by most things.

Dead people who made an effort to be corporeal were a different story. At that point, they appeared more or less like living people; they could be seen, photographed, recorded, and would cast reflections.

There were, however, certain differences.

“Q,” Bond said slowly.

“ _Bond_ ,” Q answered.

“Why am I a skeleton?”

“ _Oh, have you not seen your reflection over there yet_?”

“I usually don’t _have_ one.”

“ _You do when you go around being visible_ ,” Q informed Bond. “ _You really have to be one of the only extractors I’ve known who prefers visibility over the alternative_.”

“But why am I… colorful?” Bond scrutinized the image reflecting back at him in the high-shine window he’d been passing; it wasn’t terribly distinct, but he could see shapes of some kind on the skull where his face should have been. “Can anyone see this?”

“ _Not anyone, no. Other souls and spirits, the soon to be dead, and very perceptive mortals. Most others can’t see your true reflection_.”

“True reflection?”

“ _Supposedly, it’s a reflection of your inner self, who you are beneath your mortal skin, something like that_.” Bond had the impression that Q was waving his hand in an “et cetera” motion.

“You don’t believe it?” Bond raised one brow questioningly, and it was odd not to see the action mirrored on his skeletal face.

“ _It seems significant for some people and arbitrary for others_ ,” Q answered shortly. “ _And may I remind you that you have a soul to see to in the next 15 minutes_?”

“Already on my way, Q,” Bond said as he headed along the route meant to take him to his next assignment. “Nothing wrong with a little sight-seeing.”

If the noise that came over the earpiece then was a laugh, Bond was sure Q would never actually admit to it.

Only once the soul had been dealt with—not a particularly tenacious fighter and fairly easily sent on its way—and Q had no reason to object to a brief detour did Bond locate a mirror and put in an effort towards visibility once more.

Rather than the standard bone color, Bond’s skull was an intriguing shade of purple, the top and sides swathed with blood red flower petals while the front of his face bore several little red and grey diamonds. They reminded him a little of a suit of playing cards.

“ _Bond? What’s your status regarding departure_?” Q’s voice came into Bond’s ear.

“In a moment, Q.”

There was a beat of silence, and as Bond watched the hollow sockets of his eyes, he would have sworn he saw a brief, twisting flash of white.

“ _Are you looking at your reflection again_?” Q asked after a moment.

Bond hummed an affirmative. “Seems as though Mexico got it right.”

“ _Well, we do try not leave traces, but mistakes are made. Extractors have been seen on occasion_.”

“Have you ever seen yours?” Bond asked after a moment. “Your reflection?”

For a long moment, it seemed as though Q wouldn’t answer, but then: “ _Once_.”

“And?” Bond prompted.

“ _What, did it reveal my inner soul_?”

“Not quite the phrasing I would have used.”

Q scoffed. “ _It didn’t reveal anything. Lots of sort of teal-blue, lots of flowers. Not even my favorite color_.”

Bond hummed again, considering this time.

“ _Curiosity satisfied_?” Q asked after one more obliging moment of silence.

Not really, but Bond moved on anyway, uncertain if there was anything else to be learned from his own dead reflection.

-/-/-

After so much time spent speaking over headsets, it felt a little odd to be around Q in person; most of their time speaking face to face took place while Bond was checking his scythe out and in before and after assignments. Minus a few suspicious glances, however, Q didn’t seem to _mind_ that Bond had parked himself next to his workstation, so Bond stayed and watched with idle curiosity as Q worked.

He was quite familiar with a lot of Q’s job responsibilities as they looked from the outside, but had never actually seen him working for more than the few minutes it took him to disengage and accompany Bond to the equipment room.

Mostly, it looked exactly as Bond imagined it would: Q was engaged but impassive, professional and competent, his posture neat and in-control. He answered whichever reaper he had on the line as promptly as he always did Bond, and offered the same calm direction, though Bond noted with some satisfaction that he did so with far less sarcasm and snark than Bond always got.

Uncertain just why, Bond liked the idea that Q only bantered like that with him.

It wasn’t altogether disinteresting to watch, but it offered no surprising insight – until Q declared that the passage was going to open.

Q took his hands off the keyboard and, studying the image on the screen carefully, raised them in front of his chest. Starting with his palms pressed nearly together, fingers straight, Q drew his hands apart slowly, and the light tearing through the air in the image on the screen mirrored his actions and grew wider.

When the passage had reached an acceptable width, Q held his hands there, focusing intently on the screen. He didn’t appear strained, but held himself still: anticipant and at-ready. Bond took his eyes from Q to watch the reaper on the screen contend with the unruly soul he’d just pulled from what had sounded like a mass-murderer.

As soon as the soul had been wrestled into the pull of the light and the reaper was clear, Q pressed his hands back together and sealed the passage up.

The rest of it was familiar, proceedings involving the reaper’s return to the afterlife, coordination with the tech operating the gate, and so on, and Bond allowed it to wash over him until Q had signed off.

“I didn’t know you did that.”

Q pulled his attention slowly form whatever he was doing now—filling out some sort of form, it looked like—and blinked over at Bond as if he’d forgotten the man was there. “Did what?”

“Opened the passage.” Bond gestured to the screen.

“How did you think it opened?” Q asked, brows raised.

Bond shrugged one careless shoulder. “I thought it just happened in response to a newly harvested soul.”

An amused smirk quirked up at one corner of Q’s mouth. “And how did you think I always know when and where the passage will open?”

“You have sensors for everything else, why not that?”

“Touché.” Q shrugged. “In your defense, I suppose, you really haven’t spent much time down here.”

“I haven’t,” Bond agreed.

“You learn all sorts of new things when you’re hiding from the people in Reports, don’t you?” Q teased.

“I’m not hiding. They know exactly where I am, they just won’t come get me in here.” Bond eyed Q appraisingly. “They seem to be afraid of you, for some reason.”

Q sighed, aggrieved. “ _Once_. I lost my temper once and it got blown entirely out of proportion.”

“I’m not sure it’s _entirely_ out of proportion. It was a pretty spectacular blowup,” R chimed in from a station behind them.

Glancing over, Q frowned. “It wasn’t that bad.”

“You threatened to send him to where the twisted souls go,” R pointed out, not without some amusement.

Q’s lips drew to the side consideringly. “Well, I apologized.”

“No, you didn’t,” R laughed.

For a moment, Q’s eyes flicked back and forth over the air in front of him, as if searching for something, brows drawn together in thought. “Well, I meant to,” he concluded eventually. “They should know I’m not actually capable of that, anyway.”

“You sounded pretty convincing. I think if you’d stayed angry long enough, you might have figured it out,” R said with a grin.

Q only rolled his eyes, then glanced over at Bond. “I don’t just run around threatening people regularly,” he said.

“I didn’t say anything,” Bond replied evenly, though he had the feeling he looked too amused to be convincing.

“He interrupted an incredibly important extraction at the worst possible time,” Q insisted. “That mortal had been evading death for ages and we’d _finally_ caught him – and then his soul escaped, thanks to that idiot from Reports.”

“The living can do that?” Bond asked. “Evade death?”

“Some. Not many. Far fewer than there used to be, thank God.” Q turned his attention back to his screen. “Death magic is something of a _dying_ art among the living.”

Q’s self-amused chuckles were no joined by anyone, though Bond thought he saw R smile out of the corner of his eye.

When it became apparent no one else was amused, Q cut himself off with a cough. “Yes, well, anyway,” he gestured vaguely to his screen, “extractors used to do it all themselves, you know.”

“Do what?” Bond asked, briefly brought up short by the sudden change of subject.

“All of it. Locating the soul, extracting it, opening and closing the passage – they had to be capable of the whole process.” Q waved a hand as if to encompass the room, then went back to typing. “It wasn’t the best system. If someone wanted to retire, they first had to find a replacement, and it was difficult to find people up for the task.”

“So they split the tasks up,” Bond hazarded.

Q gave an affirmative hum. “For a while, they sent teams to the mortal plain; one to extract the soul and one to open the passage. Not terrible, as long as partners got on,” Q said with a little shrug. “But then we figured out how to use computers to replace line of sight spellcasting and it’s been considerably easier.”

Bond watched Q work for a few moments, considering the switch from “they” to “we,” considering Q’s casual assessment of the partnership model, and wondering just how long Q had been here, really.

“Well, now I feel as though I’m owed a drink,” Bond said after a moment.

Q glanced up, surprised, and Bond wondered if he’d been expecting a question along the lines of what Bond had been thinking. “Pardon me?”

“I said I didn’t want a lecture unless you were going to buy me a drink first,” Bond reminded him lightly.

Q looked on in confusion for a moment longer before rolling his eyes and glancing away with a bitten-down smirk. “That was hardly a lecture, Bond.”

Bond took a step closer, voice lowered so as not to broadcast to the whole room. “Let me buy you a drink, then.”

“I’m not sure that’s how it works,” Q said, giving Bond a quick, calculating glance.

Bond shrugged. “Maybe I’m just in the mood for good company.”

Q’s calculating look was back, longer and more searching this time, lit from behind with uncertainty. After a few moments, Q glanced away again, looking to the station R was using. “R…”

“I’ve got the next assignment,” R said breezily. “You know, if you were planning on going somewhere. I don’t mind.”

Q blinked. Bond very determinedly did not smirk at him.

“Well,” Q said slowly, “it would seem as though I have some free time.”

“Excellent.” Bond swept a hand towards the exit. “Shall we?”

“You do know that the idea of _buying_ a drink is rather moot here, right?” Q asked as he gathered up his bag and jacket.

“Humor me,” Bond said, walking with Q to the door.

Q hummed, flashing Bond a small grin. “Just this once,” he murmured.

-/-/-

Being as Bond was already dead, there was very little for him to fear in the mortality department.

At worst, his physical manifestation on the mortal plain could take damage if he was presenting as corporeal – which was to say, if he was solid, he could be hurt. Not hurt permanently, of course; he was, after all, dead. His presence on the mortal plain was outside the bounds of usual human experience – yes, he could be damaged, but it wouldn’t last.

The only time it became an inconvenience was if he was damaged severely enough and quickly enough that his physical manifestation was unable to heal and gave out. A kill shot, in simple terms, would send Bond back to the afterlife the long way around.

(Bond had learned all of this prior to his first assignment, explained in technical terms by a rather austere-looking man from the department that dealt with manifestations of death on Earth. R had stood behind the man and looked terribly and exaggeratedly bored while she waited to take Bond to the gates.)

Though Bond understood this all quite well, it was information that he had filed away as, at least temporarily, irrelevant. Bond found it easier to approach the dead and dying while intangible for a number of reasons; most of the time, the living didn’t have a chance to lay a hand on him, ill-intentioned or otherwise.

This was, however, before Bond realized how satisfying it was to approach someone particularly heinous and soon to be deceased while fully visible, scythe raised and expression grim.

He didn’t do it _often_ , but there was the odd occasion where the slip into death felt a little too easy given the method by which the target’s soul had become twisted. A little scare before sending them off into the afterlife didn’t seem totally remiss, and though Q had rolled his eyes at Bond the first time he’d done it, no one had told him _not_ to.

Four times out of five, the rules regarding the damage of his physical manifestation still hadn’t been relevant.

The fifth time, Bond supposed he really should have been paying attention to his target’s hands.

They say you never hear the shot that kills you. Bond, however, was already dead, and the sound of the gunshot ricocheted through his ears, inside his head, around, around–

He was in the dark. He was sitting. His hands were bound behind him, his legs were bound to the chair. There was something important he was meant to be doing. Something he needed to find. Retrieve? Remove? The thought ran from his head like water trickling out his ears, washed away by the knowledge that he had failed, and he was about to die.

They say you never hear the shot that kills you. Bond could, however, hear the cocking of the gun pressed purposefully to his forehead.

It was dark.

“Bond!”

Bond jerked backwards with a gasp. He toppled out of the chair he’d been sitting in – he wasn’t tied to it, nor were his hands bound. There was light again, familiar light. Harsh overhead light.

All at once, Bond recognized the grey walls and the grey floor and the grey table he was sitting next to, panting for breath he didn’t need because he was dead and had been dead and was back in the interrogation room in the afterlife.

“Bond?” That voice was easily recognized as well; Bond had heard it so often he was certain he’d respond in his sleep. “Are you alright?”

Q stepped to the side so Bond could see him around the edge of the table.

“Someone shot me,” Bond responded numbly.

Q pursed his lips. “Yes. An incredibly lucky shot.”

“No.” Bond shook his head. “Someone _shot me_. And I died.”

For a moment, Q looked ready to argue, to refute, but then understanding lit his eyes. “Let’s get out of here,” he said instead, nodding towards the door.

The halls were quiet as Q led Bond through them, though Bond’s attention was elsewhere. Over and over, the scene played though Bond’s head. Darkness, rough rope at his wrists, a gun barrel to his head, a click. It skipped in and out like stretched video tape, and Bond was so preoccupied with following it that he barely noticed they were in Q’s office until the door shut behind them.

Bond had been in Q’s office only a few times, mostly because it was small and cluttered and Q preferred working out on the main floor. He clearly wasn’t here to work, however, as he went straight to his desk and pulled a mostly-full bottle of scotch from the drawer, offering a glass to Bond with a raised eyebrow.

Alcohol didn’t do much more for the dead than food, mostly just offering the ghost of a buzz, but bad coping mechanisms were harder to kill than people. Bond took the glass.

Q didn’t speak until they were on their second pour each.

“So you remembered.”

“Yes.” Bond paused, amended, “No.”

“You remembered some.”

“I remembered my death.”

Q hummed. “What happened?”

It was a neutral question, neither demanding an answer nor disinterested in one, and Bond honestly couldn’t tell how much Q wanted to hear what he had to say. He replied anyway; there wasn’t much to tell.

Q hummed again when Bond finished. “What else?” He was watching Bond with open scrutiny now, and Bond bristled.

“Nothing else,” he snapped. “I try to go back and it’s still _blank_.”

“Might be for the best,” Q muttered into his glass.

“ _Excuse me_?”

“I said: _might be for the best_ ,” Q enunciated clearly. “There are some things you might be happier not knowing, Bond.”

“You’re the great expert, of course,” Bond found himself sneering.

Q didn’t respond.

“How _did_ you die, Q?” Bond demanded. He knew he was being unfair, unkind, but at that moment he didn’t really care. “What was so bloody terrible about it?”

Still turned away, Q took a sip from his drink and said nothing. Bond scoffed.

“Is it better than being tied to a chair in the dark and being shot in the bloody head?” he pushed, seething frustration and confusion, all the anger and doubt brought by remembering, but not _remembering_ . “At least you know what led up to it. Know what you did to _earn_ that death.”

With a cracking thud, Q slammed his glass down on the desk. “I didn’t _earn_ it,” he said, voice dark and firm and more gripping than if he’d screamed. “ _I didn’t deserve it_.”

Bond’s immediate response—how was he supposed to know, Q wouldn’t tell him—was swallowed. Sniping wouldn’t get him anywhere. He wanted to yell and be angry, but he wanted even more to stay in Q’s office and drink scotch and talk and _stay with Q_.

“How did you die?” he asked again, more softly but no less insistent.

Q lifted his glass to toss back whatever hadn’t sloshed out and sighed when he saw the chip that had come out of the bottom.

For a long, quiet moment, as Q reached for the scotch and poured himself another measure, Bond thought he’d pushed too far.

“Official cause of death was asphyxiation,” Q said quietly.

It wasn’t quite an answer; the real story wasn’t that Q had asphyxiated, it was _how_. But apparently, Q was feeling generous.

“It took a while to get to that point. It was drawn out and it was painful. Quite dramatic, actually, all broken bones and internal bleeding. And external bleeding. I don’t think mortal authorities were able to discern the cause in all the damage, but death’s records are perfect.” Q paused for a drink. “I choked to death on my own blood.”

Well, it certainly wasn’t _better_ than being tied to a chair and shot in the head, Bond reflected.

“So, yes, I know what led up to it, and I know I didn’t earn that death, and though I’ve mostly made my peace with it, there are times when I’m still _angry_ ,” Q said, finally looking up at Bond. “At least if you never remember, you’ll never know why your death was unjust.”

Bonds brows went up. “You say that as if you know for sure that it was.”

Q’s sliver smile was sad. “You ended up here, didn’t you? If we didn’t have to send your soul to a different plain, I doubt you deserved what happened to you.”

“Just because my soul isn’t twisted, it doesn’t mean I was a good person,” Bond argued. “I don’t think good people are chosen to be grim reapers.”

“There’s a lot more room between being a good person and being a bad one than you’d think,” Q said. “But it doesn’t really matter who you were in life, anyway. Who you are here can be different.”

“A fresh set of circumstances?” Bond recalled, raising one challenging brow.

“I was never suicidal, Bond,” Q replied sharply. “I like who I am here. I like having the chance to _be_ who I am here. But I regret that it took my death to have that chance. I would have preferred having it in life.”

Bond said nothing, and Q sighed. “More of your life may come back to you,” he offered. “But even if it never does, this is your reality now. This is what you make the most of.

“Life has never been kind to people who don’t fit the norm, but death is indifferent,” Q continued quietly. “At least here, you’re freer to be.”

“Or not to be,” Bond said, the thought slipping out as an absent counter to Q’s statement, something that had sounded like an argument until he’d said it out loud, and by the time he realized what he’d actually said, it was too late to take it back.

Q was staring at Bond as though he’d grown a second head. Bond stared back, daring Q to comment.

He didn’t, but he did burst into laughter, shattering the serious air like a plate glass window.

“I – I suppose that _is_ the question,” Q got out between chuckles.

Bond groaned, letting his head fall back in his chair. “Why do I talk to you?”

“Because I tolerate you,” Q replied, still snickering.

“It’s because you have good scotch,” Bond countered, waving his glass.

“Mhm.” Q took a sip from his own glass. He watched Bond over the rim, eyes becoming serious once more, questioning, and Bond shrugged.

He wasn’t quite ready to let it go entirely, but he could let it rest for now. Even if he didn’t have answers, he had a good drink and good company. At least for a little while, it could be enough.

-/-/-

This assignment had not gone at all according to plan.

Had Bond been anyone else, he might have turned back before things had gone entirely tits-up; though, arguably, if Bond had been anyone else, he wouldn’t have been there at all. He’d never particularly cared for philosophical arguments, however, and so left it at: he was himself, he did not turn back, things had gone entirely tits-up.

Bond did not falter at the niggling feeling that there was something _off_ about the location he’d been dropped into.

He didn’t do much more than pause when Q warned him of some interference from an unknown source, and he didn’t turn back when said interference cut off his comm link.

He didn’t turn back when he entered the room Q had been directing him towards before being cut off and it appeared the mortals inside were hosting some kind of profane ritual.

Bond certainly didn’t turn back when the feeling of wrongness increased tenfold, compounded by an odd sensation of familiarity. He couldn’t say he was familiar with the situation, but there was a presence there—a person? a soul?—that felt as if Bond should have known it.

Bond didn’t turn back because he spotted his target in the center of the ritual circle, about to be stabbed through the heart by an old man who didn’t look as though he would have been able to stab his way through a pillow. It was clear what was meant to happen, and so Bond ignored the feelings of wrongness and the communications interference and stepped forward with his scythe raised.

That was when things really went south.

It was like stepping into molasses. There was a pull against Bond’s legs, against his arms, his chest, his head. He slowed by inches and centimeters and then stopped altogether, as if the air had solidified around him.

“Sorry, reaper, but I can’t have you interfering,” the man with the dagger said to Bond – _to_ him, he knew that Bond was _there_. “I need this soul.”

The man glanced at Bond, then did a doubletake. “ _You_?”

Bond could only watch as the man lowered the dagger and left his sacrifice-to-be, who didn’t move an inch, to approach Bond. What was going on? How did this man know Bond? How could he– how had he…

Bond couldn’t think, his thoughts slipping over and around one another, too difficult to catch.

_What was going on?_

“Oh, you are a determined one, aren’t you?” the man asked, somewhere between shocked and amused. “James Bond.”

As the man came to stand before him, lips curling around his name, a memory punched Bond in the chest.

It was the same man, his round, watery eyes dark with shadowed cunning, face lined beyond reason and warped around a sneering grin. He didn’t stand in front of Bond, a few inches below his height, but over Bond at an angle that suggested Bond was on the ground. The man’s mouth was forming words.

_Goodbye, Mr. Bond._

“Do you remember me, I wonder?” the man was saying in present time. “Oh, and what have we here?”

Reaching up, the man hooked his fingers around the scythe Bond had raised in preparation to swing, and Bond jerked against whatever was holding him, actually managing to move an inch or so with an enraged grunt.

The man pulled back in alarm, but stopped, smiling, when Bond was held fast once more. “ _Very_ determined,” he purred.

Then he reached up and yanked the scythe from Bond’s unresisting grasp.

“Your visits prove ever-illuminating, Mr. Bond.” The man examined the scythe with avaricious interest, turning away from Bond as if he was no threat at all. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I do have some business to attend to.”

Bond’s scythe held at one side, the man readied his dagger and returned to the sacrifice, who was still held in some sort of trance in the center of the circle. As Bond watched, the pull increased, and things around him grew dim, dimmer, dark – and then there was nothing at all.

-/-/-

“-ond? Bond!”

Bond came around to the feeling of cool fingers on his face. Someone was patting his cheek.

“James, wake _up_.”

Ah, yes, Bond knew this one.

“This really isn’t the way I’d prefer to keep waking up to your voice,” Bond murmured.

“Oh, for _fuck’s sake_ ,” Q snapped, but Bond could hear the breathed relief beneath it. “Get up, will you? We have a problem.”

Bond’s eyes snapped open, the previous situation filtering back into his mind. The circle, the man, the _scythe_ . He sat up, pushing through the wave of dizziness—he hadn’t been aware souls _could_ get dizzy—and pushed off the floor with the brief help of a steadying hand from Q.

They were still in the room Bond had blacked out in, though the candles had gone out and the sacrifice was now nothing but a corpse. Bond needed to figure out how long it had been and where the bastard may have gone with Bond’s scythe. Maybe Q could – _hold on a minute_.

“What are you doing here?” Bond demanded, turning to face Q fully.

“Oh, and you were so happy to see me a minute ago.” Q smirked.

“ _Q_.”

“Well, a missing scythe does rather count as a problem, I may have mentioned,” Q said. “Didn’t I tell you not to lose it?”

“I haven’t lost it, it’s temporarily left my possession. I’ll be getting it back,” Bond replied.

Q cocked an eyebrow. “How?”

“With your help, apparently,” Bond said. “Any idea what happened?”

Q gestured to a thin ring of sigils on the floor, encircling the ritual circle in the center almost unnoticeably – Bond certainly hadn’t noticed it when he’d come in. A section of the ring had been dashed out, likely by Q. “The room was warded against death. It’s very specific and old magic, and one of the few that can be dangerous to us. If someone hadn’t come to free you, you’d have been caught here in stasis until the caster died. I’d have warned you to look for it if – actually, I wouldn’t have sent you at all if I’d known.” Q’s expression grew stormy. “The only information I had was that it would be a ritual killing. Not what kind of ritual, and certainly not who was performing it.”

“And who was performing it?” Bond asked, tone held carefully neutral; he doubted Q would be very forthcoming with information if he knew Bond had known this man in life.

“Edgar Sinclair,” Q said with an almost comical look of distaste. “His soul has stopped registering any sort of signal. Hasn’t done so since our second attempt at collecting it.”

“Second? How many deaths has this bastard had?”

“Too many. Or not enough. You recall the time I mentioned someone from Records interrupted an extraction?”

Ah yes, Q’s apparently terrifying fit of temper. Bond nodded.

“That was his soul we were after. Haven’t had a lock on him since.”

“So we have no way of tracking him?” Bond asked with a scowl.

“Him, no. The scythe, yes.”

“How?”

“I can sense it. I’ve been caring for the scythes long enough that I do have a certain connection with them,” Q explained, expression turning almost teasing for a moment. “You don’t think I come to the mortal plain for just any reason, do you?”

“And here I thought I was special.” Bond gave Q a little grin.

“If we get the scythe back, we’ll talk,” Q replied.

Bond raised his brows. “If? Oh, Q. Ye of little faith.”

Shaking his head, Q focused once more on the task at hand. “I think my faith is proportionate, considering the circumstances. Now, let’s get started.”

-/-/-

There were, suspiciously, no wards around Sinclair’s base of operations, making it easy to infiltrate in the same way Bond had gotten into every other building since becoming a reaper – by just walking in.

“I didn’t really expect wards around the entire building,” Q said as they walked past a guard entirely unnoticed. “They’re costly in time and energy both to create and maintain, and nearly impossible to make that large. But I’m sure there will be some sort of protection wherever Sinclair’s keeping the scythe.”

Bond nodded, silent and focused on their path. Q’s sense of the scythe had led them to the building, but he hadn’t needed to give Bond directions since they’d arrived. The nearer they drew to the scythe, the more strongly Bond could feel its call, and he and Q walked across rooms and through walls as though they knew the building by heart.

As they walked, they passed through rooms of weapons, of large and powerful-looking computer terminals, and even ones containing objects that had the taint of magic to them – all things that tended to make mortals nervous when in the possession of their enemy. Sinclair was using his stolen longevity very purposefully, it seemed.

It was all very familiar to Bond in a way his mind refused to grasp.

“It’s here,” Q said, coming to a stop outside a heavy door. “Can you feel it?”

Bond didn’t even have to concentrate to feel the call of the scythe, a unique sort of non-sound ringing in his hears. And beneath it, the oddly familiar presence; a shredded and desiccated soul, now that Bond knew what to look for. “Any more traps?”

“None of the kind that you found earlier, no.” Q frowned at the door in concentration.

Bond looked too, for all it seemed to be an unremarkable door. “How can you tell?”

“It would feel like… dead space, for want of a better term. Like there’s nothing there; wrong.”

“I felt that before,” Bond said quietly. “You really may want to consider covering these things in training.”

“Well, it doesn’t come up very often,” Q replied. “How are we doing this?”

Mostly by necessity, Q had taken charge up to that point, leading them to the scythe and sensing for traps, but he seemed willing to hand control back over to Bond now they were on more familiar ground. Sinclair’s soul was barely attached at this point, Q had explained as they’d traveled to the man’s home base, and it would need to be taken once they ( _if_ they) reclaimed the scythe. “I can open the passage,” Q had told Bond, “but the scythe is yours to wield. You’ll need to be the one to extract his soul.”

The plan they’d constructed en route was haphazard at best, but there was little time for them to regroup and strategize. The longer Sinclair was in possession of the scythe, the bigger a problem it would become; they needed to act now.

“Stay behind me. Only engage if you have to. Be ready to open the passage,” Bond instructed shortly, then gestured for Q to follow him.

The room beyond the door was enormous, filled with scientific equipment and magical artefacts alike intermingling atop a maze of lab tables in a clutter of odd experiments. A series of racks and shelves added to the confusion, housing chemicals and equipment and odds and ends, making it difficult to see the room in its entirety.

“I don’t recommend walking through any of this,” Q said quietly, gesturing to the lab tables. “No telling what he’s been doing with it.”

Bond nodded his agreement, weaving through the maze of tables and shelves on his sense of the scythe, trusting Q to follow behind and alert him to potential traps. The reverberating wrongness of Sinclair’s soul was still nearby, though where, exactly, Bond couldn’t tell, and it was putting him even further on edge.

Turning one last corner, they came to a more open area against the back wall. There was just one long table backed against what looked like it might have been another rack, this one covered with a sheet. The scythe laid unassumingly on the table, no other equipment or obvious tricks to surround it.

“Q?” Bond prompted.

“At your feet,” Q answered, gesturing to a nearly invisible, hair-thin line on the floor. “It’s not dangerous, exactly. I’d be able to tell you exactly what it was if I had access to my system, but – it’s not meant for harm.”

“Reassuring,” Bond quipped, taking a step over the fine line on the floor before Q could stop him.

Static washed down his skin, leaving an odd clinging feeling behind, along with the certainty that he was now tangible, whether he wanted to be or not.

It wasn’t the worst thing that could have happened. Bond shrugged the feeling off and approached the table. “Anything over here?” he asked, glancing back over at Q just in time to see him roll his eyes, set his shoulders, and step over the line. “Don’t–”

“Do you want an answer, or not?” Q snapped. “I can’t feel anything from over here.”

“Don’t you think it might have been beneficial for _one_ of us to remain invisible?” Bond gritted out.

“It’d rather we both be tangible and undamaged than be intangible while you get caught by something dangerous I might have stopped,” Q said, walking towards the table with light-footed care. “Hopefully, we can just retrieve the scythe and go before anything else happens.”

“You really didn’t think it would be that easy, did you?”

Bond and Q turned at the sound of Sinclair’s voice, watching the man himself walk out from behind a shelf of what appeared to be crystal balls.

“Ah, we meet again, Mr. Bond,” Sinclair murmured, sparing a look in Q’s direction. “And guest.”

In his head, Bond could all but hear the way Q would be sniping indignantly if the situation had been different. It would be very amusing later, if – _when_ they made it out of this encounter with one of the few living beings who knew how to hurt death.

“You keep saying things like that, but I really have no idea what you’re talking about,” Bond said, taking a deliberate step away from the table as Sinclair approached.

“No?” Sinclair asked with mild interest, advancing on Bond’s retreat and leaving Q in his periphery.

“You must not have been worth remembering,” Bond replied, not quite watching as Q sidled towards the table as he was apparently being ignored.

“Oh, I’m quite worth remembering, Mr. Bond. I’d wager it’s more that you don’t remember anything at all.” Sinclair smirked, the action pulling the age on his face into even more disturbing relief. “How frustrating that must be for a man like you.”

“A man like me?” Part of Bond knew he only had to keep Sinclair talking long enough for Q to get his hands on the scythe, but another, not inconsiderable part of Bond wanted to see how much information Sinclair would give away.

“A man so driven, so sure of himself… so very much distracting me.” Sinclair turned, an amused grin stretching out of his smirk. “What is your friend up to?”

Q, caught out so close to his goal, took the remaining distance to the scythe at a sprint.

“Ah-ah!” Sinclair called out, pulling a remote from his pocket and aiming it at the sheeted object behind the table.

At the press of a button, the sheet was yanked away, revealing not the rack Bond had assumed it was, but a mirror.

Q gasped, faltering and falling to his knees.

“Q!” Bond lunged forward, reaching for his fallen friend.

“I wouldn’t,” Sinclair advised, at the same moment Q let out a strangled, “ _Don’t_!”

“If you come any closer, you’ll be just as affected as – Q, you called him? Quaint,” Sinclair hummed, positioning himself close enough to the mirror that he couldn’t be reached. “The scythe will be staying with me.”

“ _Why_?” Q hissed, even as he clutched his arms across his midsection in apparent pain. “You can’t even use it!”

“No, but I’d like to reverse engineer the enchantment. Make myself immune to the effects of a reaper’s scythe forever,” Sinclair explained, watching with an idle sort of interest as Q shuddered on the floor. “And I imagine there could be quite a market for that secret.”

Q groaned, turning his face up to stare at Sinclair. In the mirror, Bond could see the lively blue of his painted skull, curled over by twining branches and broad, bright flowers. The image seemed to be blurring.

“What are you doing to him?” Bond demanded.

“Wandering souls are curiously prone to getting trapped in mirrors, did you know?” Sinclair turned to look at Q’s image in the mirror. “I’ve supercharged this one. Think of it as a magnet, and your friend as metal filings.”

On the floor, Q shivered again, but had grown quiet.

“Stop this,” Bond growled, hovering on the edge of running to Q in spite of Sinclair’s and Q’s own warnings.

Sinclair barked out a laugh. “Or what? And for that matter, why?” He turned his eyes on Bond with new interest. “You certainly didn’t need friends _before_ death. James Bond; trained killer, leaving a trail of broken hearts and broken bodies wherever he went.”

Bond’s attention snapped to Sinclair, the man sneering with the pleasure of having garnered a reaction. “How interesting it is that your purpose has barely changed.” Sinclair gave Bond a greasy smile. “Yes, I studied you when I knew you were coming for me, Mr. Bond. I could tell you, if you like.”

The mirror threw the image of Bond’s blood-tinted petals back at him, the empty sockets of his eyes appearing red, oozing, for a flashing second.

“I could tell you everything,” Sinclair continued, “and in return, you could help me with the scythe. Show me how it works.”

Bond shook his head. “Q–”

“Is really beyond your help,” Sinclair tutted.

Something about Q’s corporeal form now seemed blurred, a little too soft around the edges to be real.

“You don’t need him, though, do you? Why would you?” Sinclair continued to grin, looking rather manic now. “You don’t need friends, Mr. Bond. All you need is to know who you are.”

Bond looked from his reflection, to Sinclair, to Q, and back.

It wasn’t really a difficult decision.

“I know who I am,” he snarled, bracing himself as he rushed forward.

The mirror jerked at his entire being, dragging painfully at what felt like every molecule, but it didn’t enact its sucking pull immediately. Prepared for the sensation, at least in part, Bond had just enough time to close his hand around the scythe, bring it up, and slam the blunt end of the handle into the mirror.

Glass rained down, littering the floor in a cacophony of ringing and tinkling shards, the sound intermingling with Sinclair’s enraged scream. Bond gave him no time to finish his exclamation, bringing the scythe back around in the other direction to pull it through Sinclair’s chest.

Dislodging the soul took almost no effort at all, and it came out with a sound like the shredding of wet paper, Sinclair’s aged body teetering on its feet for a few moments before crumpling to the floor.

There was a momentary silence, broken quite abruptly by the ear-splitting shriek Sinclair’s unrecognizable soul began to let out. It was the sound of wrenching metal, cutlery on porcelain, wailing sirens – it was anger and it was utter, abject _fear_.

“ _Q_ !” Bond shouted, attempting to be heard over the noise. “ _Any time now_!”

Nothing happened, and panic flared in Bond’s chest. Had breaking the mirror been the wrong thing to do? Had Q even returned to himself?

With Sinclair’s soul still dripping from the blade of his scythe, pitch climbing so high that even Bond’s ears were beginning to hurt, Bond whirled around in time to see Q struggling to his feet and clapping his hands together in front of his chest before throwing them wide.

A rough-edged passage opened between them, the grey light shining more wildly from it than Bond was used to seeing from Q’s usual, careful portals, and Bond thrust the blade in.

The shrieking began to fade, the soul too weak and damaged, too scattered to gather itself enough to even try to grasp at the edges of the passage, which had rapidly begun to close. Bond just barely managed to remove his scythe before the passage sealed in on itself, locking the dead light and the damaged soul away where it belonged.

Nothing between them now, Bond could see the way Q was still shaking, his hands clasped in front of himself as if he was surprised by what he’d managed, but he looked whole and fully outlined once more.

“Alright?” Bond asked quietly, just to be sure.

Q nodded, taking a deep breath. “Let’s get the fuck out of here, shall we?”

Not even bothering to work against the fond little smile making its way onto his face, Bond offered Q his free arm, which was accepted with only a token glare.

-/-/-

For the first time since his death, Bond felt tired.

Not the temporary drag that came of physical exertion, but the deep sort of weariness that came of going through something stressful. The sort that, coupled with the content of a difficult task accomplished, made Bond want to sit back and do nothing for a bit – and, more or less, that was what he and Q were both doing.

Q’s stash of scotch had made a reappearance, and they were sitting side by side on the floor of Q’s office after the royal bollocking they’d received from Mallory upon their return to the afterlife.

Apparently grim reapers—and related personnel—could, in fact, be fired. Likely the only thing that had saved them from any more severe action was the fact that they had managed to send Edgar Sinclair’s soul on to the afterlife as part of the whole debacle.

Resettling himself against the wall, Bond sent a sideways smirk at Q. “You didn’t tell me you didn’t have clearance to come after me.”

Q took a prim sip of his scotch. “Would it have made any difference?”

“Not particularly.” Bond shrugged, taking a drink from his own glass. “It’s interesting, though.”

Q hummed in vague agreement. “Technically, they never revoked my field clearance,” he said in a tone that implied this entirely justified his rash decision to cross over to the mortal plain after Bond had been out of contact too long. “It was an executive decision.”

With a snort of amusement, Bond knocked back the last of his drink. “Tell Mallory that one. I’d like to watch.”

“No thank you.” Q shook his head, reaching for the bottle to thrust it at Bond. “I’ve already had someone try to pull me to pieces once this evening, I’m not giving anyone any more reasons to try.”

Turning his head as it rested against the wall, Bond gave Q a longer look. The shaking had all but stopped by the time they’d been dragged into Mallory’s office, but Q was still a little grey-faced. He’d seemed to pull himself together well, though, and Bond let it go for the moment. “You must have been very concerned about that scythe,” he said instead.

“Mm. It’s irreplaceable. Ancient. Dangerous,” Q murmured, looking into his glass. “I should have gone to find it straight away.”

That was a point – Q hadn’t needed Bond to find the scythe and likely wouldn’t have needed him to retrieve it and take it back to the afterlife had Sinclair not been involved.

“But you didn’t.”

“I didn’t even consider it.”

Bond wasn’t sure how to respond to that. Had he ever been anyone’s first priority like that? He couldn’t remember, but it felt new. He reached over with the bottle and topped off Q’s drink.

“I…” Q paused and cleared his throat in a way that felt like he was buying himself a little more time to think. “I like who I’ve come to be here. I like the existence I’ve built. I feel fulfilled doing this job, in a way. But you… don’t have to feel the same.”

Tilting his head so he could look over at Bond, Q offered him a rueful smile. “Perhaps I haven’t been fair to you about this. I could… _acquire_ your file, if you wanted to read it,” he said quietly. “It would be a little bare-bones, but it would have all the details of your death, and at least a few on your life.”

Bond almost accepted immediately, a reflex of insatiable curiosity, but stopped short of it.

Hadn’t he told Sinclair? He knew who he was. It was true when he’d said it and it was true now.

Q watched him expectantly, open and unjudging. Q liked who he was in death. He seemed to very much like who Bond was, too; and really, so did Bond. He liked performing his job. He liked existing in a place without quite so much life-or-death pressure, in the oxymoronic way he’d come to appreciate. He liked this path that had brought him here, sitting with Q on the floor of his office, tired and certain.

Bond had probably known who he was for a while, when he thought about it.

“I don’t need to read it.”

Q blinked. “No?”

“No.” Bond shook his head.

“Well.” Q paused again, apparently quite surprised. “Well, if you change your mind…”

“I’ll always know where to find you,” Bond replied.

He reached over and took Q’s hand, as if to demonstrate, but neglected to let go afterwards.

“You probably won’t have to look far,” Q agreed with a teasing little smile. “It’s not as though either of us leave work much.”

Bond gave an amused huff as Q settled back against his side, closer than before, his head almost resting tiredly on Bond’s shoulder. There was companionable silence for a while, the whirring of computers and the murmur of other technical support workers underscoring the dozy atmosphere of Q’s office.

“You know,” Bond broke the quiet with a low, considering tone, “people may have been onto something with all that about our reflections and inner selves.”

“Really?” Q sounded skeptical from his place near Bond’s shoulder.

“Mhm.”

Q sat forward, shooting Bond a look every bit as unconvinced as his voice. “You really think you saw something in your reflection that was indicative of your true self?”

“In mine? Oh, I have no idea. But in _yours_?” Bond reached up with his free hand, cupping Q’s jaw and tracing the path of an unseen branch with his thumb. “Certainly. You’re just as gorgeous as you should be.”

It looked very much like Q had eaten a lemon for a moment, and Bond realized he was trying not to smile. “Just because we’ve come very close to the nearest thing to death possible for people who are already dead,” said Q as soon as he’d gotten himself under control, “that’s no reason to go soppy on me.”

Bond smirked. “Perhaps that’s just who I am.”

At that, Q did let out a snort of laughter. “I very much doubt it.”

He leaned in and pecked the corner of Bond’s lips before Bond had the chance to retort, then leaned back against the wall once more and dropped his head on Bond’s shoulder.

Bond shook his own head, unable and unwilling to keep his smile away, and squeezed Q’s hand in his own.

Soon enough, the gentle buzz of the scotch would wear off and the exhaustion would fade and there would be more work to do, as there always was.

For the moment, though, Bond and Q were pleased to exist in one another’s space and have the opportunity simply to _be_.

(Or not to be. It all came out in the wash, really.)

-/-/-

**Author's Note:**

> You did it! You finished! Or at least made it to the bottom! Go you! Kudos and comments are always appreciated, but even if you're not feeling that, I hope you enjoyed!
> 
> Last note, I swear: I hope this story did not read as such, but just in case, nothing in this work was meant to imply that death is preferable or that it is an acceptable escape. It is not. We prefer you alive, we really do <3
> 
> You can usually find me on [Tumblr](https://solarmorrigan.tumblr.com/) if you're around!


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